Fellows’ Research
Improve Developmental Science & Beyond
The NU-MHE T32 Postdoctoral Fellowship is the first at Northwestern, and Nationally, to focus on training in neurodevelopmental clinical science and integrate the three thematic spheres: (1) Applied computational and other advanced data science methods, (2) Intervention and prevention/implementation research and strategies, (3) The intersection of mental and pediatric health.
Through the NU-MHE T32 Post-Doc Training Program, fellows will have the opportunity to expand on their research while also gaining experience and exposure in advanced computational methods. Fellows will also receive training in the design and outcome measurement of mechanism-oriented intervention/prevention for translation to real world implementation, as well as learn about the intersection between mental health and pediatric health to give a “whole person” approach towards breakthrough research. With these newfound and reinforced skills, fellows will be better equipped to lead the next generation of mental health research workforce.
- Katherine Damme, PhD
- Sophia Magro, PhD
- Brittany Manning, PhD
- Matthew Mattoni, PhD
- Tierney McMahon, PhD
- Brent Rappaport, PhD
- Blaire Pingeton, PhD
- Ivanka Ristanovic, PhD
- Hena Thakur, PhD
- Kali Woodruff Carr, PhD
- PhD, Brain, Behavior, & Cognition (BBC), Northwestern University, 2019
- BA, Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 2009
Kate’s research program examines biomarkers (i.e., structural brain features and structural/functional connectivity) of emerging psychopathology in adolescence. These emerging symptoms are happening in the context of a greater neurodevelopmental context and would benefit from an expanded perspective that incorporates a rich context of early affective, cognitive, and motor development.
The T32 Training Program will provide Kate with the skills to expand this work in longitudinal datasets. Her aim will be to provide critical insight into the etiology of psychopathology and to explain the heterogeneity of deficits within psychopathology.
- PhD, Developmental Psychopathology and Clinical Science, University of Minnesota, 2024
- MA, Developmental Psychology, University of Minnesota, 2019
- BA, Psychology & Music, St. Olaf College, 2016
As a trainee in the Developmental Psychopathology and Clinical Science program at the University of Minnesota, Sophia Magro received training in two key areas. First, she has received rigorous research training at the Institute of Child Development in the field of developmental psychology, with a particular focus on the consequences of early relational experiences at home and school for the development of psychopathology. Second, she has received intensive clinical psychology training through the Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research program, with a developing specialization in early childhood mental health. Her goal is that her postdoctoral training will build upon these foundational areas and add new expertise in translational research that has the potential to shape the implementation and evaluate the long-term consequences of early childhood mental health programs and policies. The Mental Health, Earlier Postdoctoral Fellowship will help her achieve this goal by providing her with advanced research training as well as professional development opportunities. She will pursue the following training aims under the primary mentorship of Dr. Terri Sabol, a recognized expert in early childhood education and social policy. Dr. Sabol’s affiliation with both the Institute for Policy Research and the Institute for Innovations in Developmental Sciences makes her wellpositioned to provide mentorship in the overlap between public policy and neurodevelopmental and environmental mechanisms of early childhood development. Additionally, Dr. Karen Gouze at Lurie Children’s Hospital’s Center for Childhood Resilience (CCR) is available to serve as a secondary mentor to her in early childhood mental health prevention and implementation science. Finally, Dr. Lauren Wakschlag has agreed to provide supplemental training in the assessment of early childhood psychopathology.
- PhD, Communication Sciences & Disorders, Northwestern University, 2021
- MS, Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2012
- BA, Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010
Dr. Manning has her PhD in Communication Sciences and Disorders and Speech Language Pathology. In her research, she aims to identify early brain and behavioral precursors of later disorders to maximize children’s opportunity to benefit from early intervention. Her career began clinically as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) supporting children with language delays. During this time, she became interested in the relationship between early language and mental health, observing that many young children with language delays also had more pronounced irritability than children without these delays. In addition, many of the intervention for language delays already overlap significantly with early mental health treatment (e.g. parent-child relational intervention), and SLPs are often the first professionals to see children with early delays. This has led her to the Mental Health, Earlier T32, where she is focused on the intertwining of early language and metal health, specifically how clinicians in related fields, like speech-language pathology, can best support children with early mental health vulnerability, who they often see in their practice. Her training plan is focused on moving beyond my conceptualization of mental health impairment as a frequent cooccurrence, to a central variable of interest. Funding from the T32 has been crucial in allowing her to explore independent hypotheses. Her ultimate goal is to develop a mental health prevention toolbox for speechlanguage pathologists in order to reach more children and move the dial earlier in the prevention of mental health syndromes and impairments.
- PhD, Clinical Psychology, Temple University, 2026
- MA, Psychology, Temple University, 2022
- BS, Psychology, University of North Carolina, 2019
Dr. Mattoni recently completed his Ph.D. in clinical psychology, with a concentration in quantitative methods, at Temple University and his predoctoral internship at the University of Illinois-Chicago. His research uses precision neuroimaging and individualized methods to study affective processes in depression and anxiety. Core themes include examining (1) neural signatures of positive affect and reward functioning that are predictive of psychopathology and treatment outcomes, (2) individual differences in adolescent development of positive affect and implications for psychopathology onset, (3) within-person relationships between changes in brain functioning, positive affect, and clinical symptoms. To accomplish these goals, he uses intensive longitudinal designs and advanced quantitative methods to parse how individuals differ from group averages and separate between-person (trait) and within-person (state) variance. Ultimately, Dr. Mattoni hopes to unite perspectives from idiographic science, precision medicine, and cognitive-affective neuroscience to improve the understanding and treatment of depression in anxiety in adolescents and adults.
The T32 program will support Dr. Mattoni in further training with intensive study of individuals and professional development toward a career as an independent investigator. Mentored primarily by Dr. Stewart Shankman, Dr. Mattoni is using behavioral phenotyping of psychomotor symptoms of depression and precision functional brain mapping to identify core mechanisms for an impairing form of depression. The T32 is also supporting him in writing a grant proposal for a NIH K-series award focused on an intensive longitudinal neuroimaging study of positive affect engagement.
- PhD, Clinical Psychology, University at Buffalo, 2021
- MA, Psychology, University at Buffalo, 2017
- BA, Psychology, University at Buffalo, 2013
Dr. McMahon received her PhD in clinical psychology from the University at Buffalo, where she developed both research and clinical expertise in psychological assessment, emotion regulation, and mindfulness. She is currently a second-year postdoctoral fellow in the Mental Health, Earlier T32, where she is focusing her postdoctoral training on intervention science for youth mental health, with a specific focus on implementation and dissemination of evidence-based practices for psychotherapy in youth. Dr. McMahon’s long-term career goal is to improve access to effective psychotherapy treatment in youth, such as supporting community therapists in delivering evidence-based practices through the development of tools and training resources. In service of this goal, she is currently working with her mentor, Dr. John Parkhurst, at Lurie Children’s Hospital to identify community therapists training and support needs in delivering specific evidence-based components of cognitive behavioral therapy in youth. Previous research suggests that CBT trained therapists in community practices are knowledgeable about the different components of CBT (e.g., cognitive reappraisal, exposure) but are hesitant to deliver exposure therapy components despite such practices having the strongest empirical evidence for their effectiveness in treating anxiety disorders. Dr. McMahon is interested in addressing this treatment delivery gap by exploring the utility of digital tools (e.g., apps) that can standardize or improve therapists’ competence in delivering the effective components of CBT. Dr. McMahon is also involved in two other projects evaluating measurement-specific changes in psychotherapy outcomes and identifying the systemic barriers (e.g., social determinants of health) that families experience when trying to access quality mental health care for youth.
- PhD, Clinical Psychology, Washington University, 2022
- BA, Psychology, University of Chicago, 2014
Dr. Rappaport earned a PhD in clinical psychology from Washington University in St. Louis, where he worked with Deanna Barch and Joan Luby, and completed his clinical internship at UCLA in child and adolescent acute care. Broadly, his project on this T32 has focused on structural equation modeling (SEM) of longitudinal functional brain data to identify and distinguish trait and state variance in task-based brain function. From these models, we can extract estimates of the amount of variance that is common across time points (i.e., trait variance) in brain responses during tasks, and the amount of variance that is unique to each time point (state variance). So far, this has resulted in one study using longitudinal EEG data, finding that brain responses to a startle probe while anticipating an unpredictable threat (an annoying electrical stimulation) consists of about 53-61% trait variance, and 33-39% state variance. Given that aberrant brain responses in this task are linked to anxiety disorders, this suggests that these brain responses may be a “moveable” target for experimental therapeutics. Moreover, this project involved modeling EEG data (specifically event-related potentials [ERPs]) using factor analysis (i.e., treating trials as observed variables loading onto one latent variable) which also led to significantly improved fit compared to traditional approaches which take the mean across trials. Currently, this project is being extended to be used with the publicly available ABCD dataset. The T32 has also supported him in writing a K23 proposal which is currently being revised for a resubmission. The T32 has provided him with support to advance my knowledge of structural equation modeling of longitudinal data via mentorship from Rick Zinbarg and advanced knowledge of psychophysiology (EEG/ERP) and RDoC approaches to the measurement of psychopathology via mentorship from Stewart Shankman.
- PhD, Clinical Psychology, Emory University, 2023
- MA, Clinical Psychology, Emory University, 2023
- BA, Music, New York University, 2013
Dr. Pingeton received her doctorate in clinical psychology from Emory University (mentored by Sherryl Goodman, PhD) in August 2023 and started her postdoctoral fellowship on the T32 Mental Health, Earlier training grant in September under the mentorship of Darius Tandon, PhD Her program of research seeks to better the conceptualization and treatment of perinatal mood disorders to improve intergenerational outcomes. Blaire garnered training in latent variable modeling during graduate school to recategorize perinatal depression symptoms using alternative, transdiagnostic constructs with the goal of leveraging less heterogenous models of perinatal mood symptoms to better clinical outcomes. She is thrilled to be in DevSci and the Mothers and Babies lab for the next phase of her career, where she can merge her novel conceptualization of perinatal depression symptoms with training in intervention and dissemination of evidence-based protocols to prevent and treat perinatal depression. During her MHE tenure Blaire has submitted one grant application; spent time writing, revising and submitting manuscripts; and received training and mentoring in several on-going collaborative projects.
PhD, Clinical Psychology, Northwestern University, 2025- MS, Clinical Psychology, Northwestern University, 2021
- MA, Clinical Psychology, Roosevelt University, 2015
- BA, Psychology, Roosevelt University, 2012
- PhD, Clinical-Community Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2024
- MS, Clinical-Community Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018
- BA, Medical Sciences, Boston University, 2014
Dr. Thakur plans to use her time as a postdoctoral fellow to develop and implement an accessible prevention and early intervention protocol that facilitates reduction in distress and an increase in positive wellbeing for youth who have experienced trauma. Specifically, under the mentorship of Dr. Jessica Schleider, a leader in the implementation science field, she will develop a scalable intervention targeting trauma-related sequelae among youth. In line with past methods undertaken by Dr. Schleider, Hena will broaden her current analytic skillset to include conducting and analyzing systematic/meta-analytic reviews and qualitative interviews. She then plans to evaluate the implementation of the developed prevention/early intervention model within the context of youth-facing health services, working with Drs. Diane Chen and John Parkhurst on the integration of prevention/early intervention efforts into adolescent outpatient and primary care settings. By working with Dr. Chen, she will have the opportunity to extend her work to transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse youth, a population who is at disproportionate risk for experiencing adversity. Hena completed her doctoral training in clinical-community psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interest in dissemination and implementation led her to the Medical University of South Carolina for her predoctoral clinical internship, where she is participating in a mixed methods Hybrid Trial Type 1 effectiveness project examining the impact of technology-based toolkits for providers and youth participating in traumafocused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT). Hena’s graduate and clinical training to date has focused on identifying predictors of traumarelated sequelae among youth but now wants to focus on postdoctoral training that will bolster the ability to develop, utilize and disseminate findings for implementation science-based study designs.
- PhD, Communication Sciences & Disorders, Northwestern University, 2021
- BS, Psychology, University of Florida, 2012
- BM, Music Performance, University of Florida, 2012
Kali’s research program examines the intersection of early language, learning, and mental health—and the biological mechanisms that underlie these behaviors across the lifespan. She is currently investigating how infants’ neural activity can be used to predict mental health risk factors and disordered language development in early childhood.
The T32 Training Program will provide Kali with the skills to develop sophisticated models of developing neural and behavioral networks to trace emerging disordered language and psychopathology. Her work aims to inform and improve preventative, individualized interventions that will have a meaningful impact on reducing the public health burden of disordered language and psychopathology.